Solved: Auto Attendant, Hunt Group, or neither for location prioritization?

TechSerCoord · ‎08-08-2024

We have migrated from cucm to Webex recently, before the migration our IT department had prioritization based on the locations of the callers.

Ex: Building 1 Staff calls IT, goes to Building 1 Technician, if no answer, building 2, all the way to Building 5 if nobody in between answers.

I am trying to recreate that setup, however, the previous configuration was not setup by me, and cucm is old and different.

My question, is should I be using an auto attendant, hunt group, or a different calling feature to prioritize calls?

For context, each buildings extensions are different, ex: 1xxx for building 1, 2xxx for building 2, etc.

We have it set up so that all IT lines are through one phone number, with many phones.

kctrey · ‎08-08-2024

I think the answer is going to depend on how many users/phones are at each building. You used the word "technician" but if you really mean "technicians" and there is more than one person that needs to be tried at each building, it's a different approach. Here is what I would recommend:

One tech per building: Call Queue per Location with defined order of all building techs. The order of the techs will be different for each location with the location's own tech as the first agent.

Multiple techs per building: Hunt Group per Location with building techs only in a Simultaneous hunt. Overflow each Hunt Group to the next building, which will end up with a static order of buildings

In both cases, the "thing" that the One IT Phone Number hits first is going to need to be different per Location, so you'll need to plan for that. Ideally, a user at every location would dial a common extension and you could define the building-specific HG/CQ with the same extension everywhere. If they need to dial a 10-digit number, you could either do a Location-specific Translation Pattern or just define the 10 digits as the Extension, depending on whether that number needs to be dialed from outside the network as well.

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kctrey · ‎08-08-2024

I think the answer is going to depend on how many users/phones are at each building. You used the word "technician" but if you really mean "technicians" and there is more than one person that needs to be tried at each building, it's a different approach. Here is what I would recommend:

One tech per building: Call Queue per Location with defined order of all building techs. The order of the techs will be different for each location with the location's own tech as the first agent.

Multiple techs per building: Hunt Group per Location with building techs only in a Simultaneous hunt. Overflow each Hunt Group to the next building, which will end up with a static order of buildings

In both cases, the "thing" that the One IT Phone Number hits first is going to need to be different per Location, so you'll need to plan for that. Ideally, a user at every location would dial a common extension and you could define the building-specific HG/CQ with the same extension everywhere. If they need to dial a 10-digit number, you could either do a Location-specific Translation Pattern or just define the 10 digits as the Extension, depending on whether that number needs to be dialed from outside the network as well.